What exactly is the cost of self hosting a Lemmy instance? Understandably you would want a powerful server, but that would be just a single one time purchase.

Where does the rest of the cost come in? Does it require more than a 2 gigabit connection and thus require a data centers 10 gigabit connection?

If I could run an instance on 2 gigabits and spending a 1-3 thousand on a server then I’d be interested in giving it a try.

  • binwiederhier@discuss.ntfy.shEnglish
    11·
    1 year ago

    I host an instance for myself. I have subscribed to many communities (10-20), and I run it on a 1 CPU + 1 GB RAM DigitalOcean droplet. However, the Lemmy instance was OOM-killed already once, and I expect that I have to upgrade eventually.

    The droplet costs $6/month.

    • homelabber@lemmy.oneEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      That’s strange, from what I’ve read a VPS like that should be able to handle at least 20 concurrent users.

      Are you running anything else on the VPS?

      • binwiederhier@discuss.ntfy.shEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        “If you need to use the swap, you’re doing it wrong” – That’s what I learned long ago. And it has held up so far.

        • Dax87@forum.stellarcastle.netEnglish
          6·
          1 year ago

          Interesting. I’ve never heard that. I use swap all the time and it’s saved me from OOM scenarios. I’m currently limited on RAM so maybe it makes more sense for my situation.

          • vividspecter@lemmy.worldEnglish
            5·
            1 year ago

            zram and other compressed swap approaches can help too (with less of a performance hit) although I use real swap as a fallback. Some would recommend using zswap in that case, but I still want compression in ram to be heavily prioritised but YMMV.

          • th3raid0rAEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            Right? Like, my “first” machine had 512MB of ram in an era where most people were running 4GB. SWAP made more modern distributions possible for me. I mean, then again, that wasn’t so much a choice than the harsh reality of growing up broke!

            (My ACTUAL first machine was more like 64MB, but I never did much with it)

          • binwiederhier@discuss.ntfy.shEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            I have a laptop with an NVMe drive, and even using a swap on NVMe is orders of magnitude slower than RAM. Usually as soon as you have to swap, everything grinds to a halt quickly, and more stuff stacks up. You can decide for yourself, if you’d rather die a slow death or a quick death.

            • Dax87@forum.stellarcastle.netEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              Yeah I definitely get that. By default, swap is supposed to be secondary to ram, usually swappiness is configured that way. I was not implying that swap was a replacement for RAM, just that it might save you from OOM situations in exchange for some performance dips.